


The Plan

by thedevilchicken



Category: The Following
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, First Time, Fix-It of Sorts, M/M, Post-Canon, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-28
Updated: 2015-10-28
Packaged: 2018-04-28 15:28:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5095787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Joe has a plan. Ryan's surprised he's going along with it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Plan

**Author's Note:**

  * For [reeby10](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reeby10/gifts).



He woke in a bed that wasn’t his. 

It wasn’t the first time it’d happened but this time there was no girl there next to him, no sound of a running shower or percolating coffee to say she’d just stepped out of the room for a second, not even a photo in a frame or a bra strung artistically over the back of a worn chair to give away the fact that there was anyone there but him. He couldn’t remember how he’d gotten there and hadn’t picked up a girl in a bar in a _year_ , not since before his convincing fake death. The last thing he recalled was walking through a park in DC in the snow, slipping every third step on the path that had been packed down tight by thousands of snow boots and never dug or salted, and then this. Hell, he didn’t even know if it was morning or night; it was dark outside, without his wristwatch it could’ve been either. 

He was unarmed, no trace of any of his broad variety of illegal firearms anywhere in sight. That stood to reason since he’d woken in a strange bed in a strange place in his damn underwear and couldn’t even see the rest of his clothes, let alone a gun, but there was nothing there he could’ve used as a weapon, either; he left the bed and took a quick, quiet circuit of the bedroom, found empty drawers in the dresser, not even a damn hanger in the closet, a Gideon Bible in the nightstand that he guessed was just a nod to the ironic because this sure as hell didn’t feel like a hotel room - no lock on the door, no crappy room service menu on the dresser. There wasn’t even a fire evacuation plan up on the wall, the sort of crap he’d only ever looked at since he’d joined the FBI because who the hell did?

He tried the door; there was no lock so he wasn’t surprised it was open but he turned the handle carefully, quietly, armed with a freaking Gideon Bible and hopefully the element of surprise, but there was no one in the living room outside and there was nothing in there he could use as a weapon, either. He went around the room, empty aside from the heavy leather couch, not even an electrical cord or pen or a mirror he could break into shards and wrap with his undershirt to make a semi-safe grip. Same with the kitchen - no appliances, no equipment, no tableware, no cutlery, just empty cupboards and empty drawers and a bottle of water in the buzzing refrigerator that he wouldn’t’ve touched if he’d been paid to. Same again with the bathroom. He couldn’t even yank the cabinet off of the wall or detach the freaking shower head so there he was, standing in the damn living room of an utterly empty one-bed apartment in his underwear with a Bible in his hand when the door opened. 

“Mr Hardy.” The guy who entered was tall and oily-elegant in a well-pressed, well-tailored suit, wearing a politician’s smile. He put down a tray of food on the boxy arm of the couch and then smoothed down his jacket like it’d ever seen a wrinkle in its whole existence. “Apologies for the manner of your arrival but you didn’t leave us a particularly wide variety of options.”

“Yeah, I get that a lot.” Ryan shrugged, still holding the Bible in one hand, _clenching_ it in one hand till his knuckles were white from it. “So, where _is_ here?”

The man took a deep breath as he looked around the room, his distaste for the empty space pretty damn apparent on his face. He probably lived in some fancy-ass multi-million-dollar apartment someplace in New York. 

“You’re at the Harrington School, Mr Hardy,” he said, eventually, just as Ryan’s patience was really wearing thin. Not that he had much patience on a day to day basis, not that he ever had, and he certainly hadn’t in the past year. “We have a job offer to put to you.”

It was part way through that job offer when Ryan finally lost it. The guy wasn’t even remotely prepared for what happened, that much was pretty obvious; Ryan hit him with the damn Bible mid-sentence, took him down with a knee to the gut and then hit him again as the guy wailed, hit him _again_ , rights and lefts as he went down over the guy’s waist with his knees of the floor and kept going, _kept going_ until the only sound was his fists against wet bone and his too-quick breath, until his arms ached and his hands were cut up and bloody and the guy was dead there on the floor. Then Ryan picked himself up, staggered a couple of steps into the bathroom and threw up. Twice. 

It was Eliza’s group when it came down to it and they’d picked him up not to kill him, not to get him out of the way, not because he was a thorn in their side but because, fuck, _fuck_. 

They’d picked him up because they wanted him to teach their fucking _children_. 

\---

Ryan slept. More. Again. He felt like he’d already slept for days. 

Maybe they’d drugged him, he thought. He couldn’t find any marks but considering the lack of useful mirrors - the bathroom cabinet was set so high up on the wall it like it was meant for a goddamn giant - and the limited use of the window glass, it was pretty hard to be completely sure he was free of them. It made sense that he’d been drugged. He felt sluggish and tired but fuck, it wasn’t like they didn’t know exactly where he was if they wanted to shoot him so he cleaned out his bruised, bloody, shredded knuckles under the bathroom faucet, wrapped them with strips of cotton he tore off of the bed sheets, ate the packaged dessert from the tray of food the dead guy had brought in with him, then he went back to the bed that wasn’t his and he slept. 

In the morning, because by then he was pretty sure it was morning even with the cloudy sky, the body was gone. So was the tray. So was the fucking Bible, and so was any other trace there’d ever been anyone else in the apartment at all except for Ryan; while he’d slept, probably fucking drugged again, they’d cleaned away the blood from the hardwood floor just inside the apartment door, they’d cleaned the blood from the bathroom sink, even taken away the empty pot from the pudding he’d had to eat with his fingers for lack of a spoon. From that damn awkward not-meal, he was pretty sure one or two of his fingers were broken. That wasn’t exactly a first. He’d lost count of the bones he’d broken. 

“You ought to get those seen to,” Joe said. 

“Yeah, I oughtta do a lot of things,” Ryan muttered in reply, rubbing his raw knuckles over his makeshift bandages, and he went to the apartment door and tried the handle. It was locked, ‘cause of course it was. He went to the window, past Joe who was stretched out there on the couch reading a book, and he beat the heels of his hands against the glass, lightly at first then hard enough to bruise. It didn’t budge, not that it was like he’d thought it would. So he went back to the door and he leaned back against it. At least he’d hear footsteps outside if there were any, though right then there weren’t. 

“You _could_ just ask them to let you go, you know,” Joe said. Ryan watched him across the room, as he rested his head back against the heavy apartment door; Joe put a post-it note in the book to mark his page and then closed it, pushed himself up to sitting instead of sprawling and set the book down on the coffee table. Fucking Hawthorne, like Joe hadn’t read _The Scarlet Letter_ fifty times before, like he was even reading it now. Ryan had been seeing him without really seeing him for months by then, for nearly a year, since the execution. He’d been seeing him everywhere he went, till it was normal, till he fell asleep at night sometimes with Joe lying next to him, still mid-sentence. “It’s not a bad offer, if you stop to think about it.” Joe stretched broadly, his dark sweater pulling up over his wrists as he did so and so he took a second to tug them back into place. “Of course, you’re not going to do that until it dawns on you that they’ve known where you were all along. And the only way you can be sure they won’t put a bullet in your niece’s head is to agree to whatever they want you to do.”

Ryan sighed. Just like always, like _always_ , Joe was right. The Joe in his head had been just as insufferable as the real thing so he closed his eyes to keep from looking at him. He rubbed his face with one palm, rubbed his eyes with the heels of both hands, and then he sighed again. He was in an impossible fucking situation. 

“You’re right,” he said. 

“I’m _right_?” Joe said. And he sounded so genuinely bemused by the thought of Ryan’s agreement that Ryan opened up his eyes again and frowned at him across the room. 

“So you’re saying you’re _not_ right?”

“No, no, not by any means.” Joe frowned and reached over to the table to pick up his book again and then he stood, smoothing down his sweater with his free hand. “I’m just a little… _surprised_ that you agree. You’re usually so gung-ho about these things, shoot first and ask questions later. The new attitude is quite refreshing.” 

“Yeah, well, recently I’ve been agreeing with you a lot of the time.” 

Joe’s eyes narrowed just a fraction more as he stood there by the couch, holding his book in his hands, bending it forwards then back. Ryan could practically hear the goddamn gears turning. 

“Ryan, when was the last time we spoke?” Joe said.

“You’d know, you were there.”

“Indulge me.”

Ryan shrugged, his back still pressed up to the door so his undershirt slipped against it. “Back in DC. In the park, tracking down Eliza. Before all this. You were telling me I was being an ass.”

“Well, that certainly does _sound_ like me…” The frown vanished from Joe’s face in an instant and he smiled that smile that’d never meant anything good and usually meant pretty much the opposite, smug fucking ass that he’d always been. He knew Joe’s epiphany face and that was it. 

“Oh, Ryan. You’ve been hallucinating me.” Ryan’s stomach clenched hard, cold. “I have to admit that’s very flattering. And I suppose it answers the question of why you weren’t even faintly surprised to see me. Do you see me often or is it just every now and then? Are we _friends_?”

Ryan frowned. Joe in his head had always seemed real, every time he’d seen him, every time they’d spoken and every time he’d tried to ignore him but hell, he’d never actually managed it because even in his head, Joe was persistent. They’d had whole conversations sitting in crappy motel rooms, hotel rooms, roach-infested apartments, Joe giving his unsolicited opinion on the décor and the point the investigation had gotten to while Ryan poured two glasses of cheap vodka that even the Joe in his head wouldn’t drink, never mind the real one. He’d seemed real but fuck, he hadn’t seemed _this_ real, this self-aware. He’d never been like this. 

“You died, Joe. Didn’t think I needed to remind you.”

Joe came closer. Ryan could hear his footsteps on the hardwood floor, could hear his breath, see the rise and fall of his chest. 

“I’m sorry to disappoint, but I’m afraid I have to beg to differ,” Joe said. He spread his arms wide, gave a slow turn on the spot. “I’m very much alive, as you can see.”

“I don’t believe you.” 

“Then I should persuade you.” 

Joe dropped his book onto the floor and the slap of the cheap mass-market paperback hitting wood made Ryan flinch. Joe stepped closer, set one hand at either side of Ryan’s shoulders against the apartment door but didn’t stop, raised one of his hands and even before he touched him, Ryan could feel the heat of Joe’s palm against his cheek. Then his fingers rasped against Ryan’s stubble, and Ryan drew an unsteady breath, wide-eyed. And before he could stop himself, before he even knew what the fuck he was about to do, he lashed out, his fist connecting with Joe’s jaw and sending him skittering back a couple of paces but before Joe could so much as think as retaliating Ryan had closed the distance and got his arms wrapped around him, tight, fingers twisted into handfuls of Joe’s sweater as he pressed his face into the crook of Joe’s neck. It hurt his hands like hell but it was worth it somehow. 

“I’m not sure I deserved that,” Joe said, half amused and half bemused, but he brought up his arms and wrapped them loosely around Ryan’s waist. 

“I thought.” Ryan shook his head, giving himself a mental eyeroll as he took a breath to try to steady himself though it felt for all the fucking world like he was falling or sinking or turning giddy circles around the room because _Joe was really there_. “Fuck, you know what I thought.”

Joe pulled back slowly at that, not far, just far enough to cup Ryan’s jaw with his hands and Ryan looked at Joe looking at him, all familiar dark eyes and that familiar faint wry twist to his lips. Ryan’s hands were still clenching Joe’s sweater painfully, he was still frowning hard, still whatever the fuck it was that he was because he wasn’t totally sure he could put a name to it. Except he wanted to throw up and he wanted a drink and he wanted to hang the fuck on until he believed Joe was really real and really there and not just a figment of his imagination like he had been for a full twelve months by then. 

“You thought you’d lost me,” Joe said, and for once he didn’t sound smug, didn’t even look it with the bright red patch at his jaw where Ryan had hit him and must’ve left a bruise, and there was no hint left of his usual smile, no hint that he even found the thing amusing. He just brought his forehead down to rest against Ryan’s, brought his hands back up to his jaw, thumbs to his cheekbones. “To be frank, I thought you’d lost me, too. It wasn’t until I woke up here on campus that I realised that I wasn’t actually dead after all. It was quite the surprise, let me tell you.” 

For a long moment, Ryan didn’t reply. For a long moment he didn’t even move, just let his forehead rest against Joe’s, felt Joe’s hands go down from his prickly jaw to his shoulders there over his crumpled undershirt then down to rest against his hips while Ryan just held on, feeling Joe’s breath as much as he heard it, the brush of it against his skin, the rise and fall of his chest against Ryan’s as they stood there together. And fuck, he should've been repulsed. He should’ve been disgusted by his own damn reaction to all of this because this was _Joe_ , murderer, serial killer, cult leader, _Joe Carroll_ , a guy he’d hunted down and put away and gotten _executed_. Not that that’d taken. He should’ve known it wouldn’t. 

Then, in the end, Joe stepped back and Ryan let him, took a step back and rested his head back heavily against the door with a dull thud. Joe stooped to retrieve his book.

“Tell them I’ll take the job,” Ryan said, and Joe looked up at him from his crouch; Ryan held out his hand and helped Joe back up, glancing at their joined hands with a sharp pang of something that should’ve been disgust.

“I’ll tell the headmaster,” Joe said. “And I’ll also tell him that you’ll try not to kill anyone else on the premises. Please do try not to. I vouched for you.”

Ryan nodded his agreement, the movement tight, nearly awkward. He wasn’t disgusted, wasn’t even close to that. What he felt was relief. 

\---

Joe left the room; Ryan heard the lock turn back into place when the door shut behind him. He was trapped again, but he guessed there hadn’t really been a moment when he wasn’t.

He took a seat on the couch and he shook, he just _shook_ because he couldn’t stop himself doing it. This whole thing was nothing he’d expected though he guessed maybe he should’ve gotten to the point where he expected the unexpected, what with Joe Carroll being in his life and shit. Ten minutes later, Joe came back in and by then Ryan had taken enough deep breaths and flexed his hands and shook his head enough to just about get the damn shock out of his system. Joe passed Ryan a set of clothes and a pair of shoes - the shoes were the ones he’d been wearing back in DC but the clothes definitely weren’t the same. It didn’t take a genius - or an FBI agent - to work out that they were Joe’s when he shook them out of their neat little stack; he quirked a brow in Joe’s direction, got a faint shrug in response, then stripped out of his underwear to change. Joe wolf-whistled ironically. Ryan chuckled darkly in spite of himself. 

“You’ll be ecstatic to hear you’ll be staying with me until they actually manage to furnish your apartment,” Joe told him, looking back at him over his shoulder as he was rapping smartly on the door. It opened quickly; two burly guys in black both toting MAC-10s were on the other side and Ryan practically rolled his eyes at the overkill of it. “You know, most of us don’t warrant an armed escort. Then again, most of us haven’t beaten the deputy headmaster to death using only our fists and a copy of the New Testament. Kudos, by the way. I’d been wanting to do that since the day I arrived. He was an arrogant arse.”

Ryan said nothing about the irony of that statement. He just followed Joe out of the room, eyeballing the guys in black pretty damn obviously. He could’ve taken them, he thought. Might’ve gotten himself and probably Joe shot in the process ‘cause they had a pretty trigger-happy air about them, but he could’ve taken them.

Joe’s apartment was in a separate block and they walked there through the snow outside, crunching their way across a wide, tree-lined courtyard with two armed guards following their every step along the way. Joe talked, which was nothing new because Joe always talked, even the Joe in his head talked, then they knocked the snow from their boots and went inside, went up the stairs; Joe gave the guards a rather pointed look that Ryan guessed he correctly interpreted as _don’t you even think about coming in_ , and then they stepped inside. 

It was just like the apartment where Ryan had started out except there was actual furniture in there, a coat stand inside the door with two jackets and an umbrella hanging from it, a shoe rack covered in Oxfords and brogues and the snow boots that Joe left there with a rather conspicuous pair of running shoes; Joe had never seemed like the jogging type before. The living room was full of bookcases, shelves, all covered in books that Ryan was pretty sure he recognised from Joe’s office back at Winslow, his study in the house he’d had just off-campus and maybe his various cells over the years. A huge, heavy wooden desk and a leather desk chair sat under the window. Maybe they’d come over from Winslow, too; they sure as hell reminded Ryan of the weeks before Joe was arrested for the murders. 

“You’ll find the bathroom through that door,” Joe told him, gesturing. “The kitchen is that way, my bedroom’s through there, but you probably find the layout familiar, I’m not sure the architect was particularly inspired.” Joe put down his book on the desk and leant against the edge of it. “You’ll be sleeping on the sofa. It’s actually surprisingly comfortable for a sofa, I’m sure you’ll agree.” 

Ryan didn’t say a word. He just toed off his boots by the rack by the door and took a slow tour around the room, trailing his fingers over the spines of Joe’s books on their floor-to-ceiling cases. Apparently defying death hadn’t encouraged him to leave his old life behind at all, at least not that part of it. Joe had always been a smart-ass English professor as well as a cold-blooded killer, after all.

“Look, I hate to do this but I have a class to get to,” Joe said, with a pseudo-apologetic smile. “Make yourself at home. Feel free to rifle through my drawers, I know you’re curious.” He came closer, quickly, before Ryan had a chance to move away; Joe leaned past him, picked up a notebook from the desk but it turned out that was just a ruse. “Don’t worry,” he whispered, right there by Ryan’s ear. “I have a plan.”

Then he left. Ryan got the impression that the guards outside the door did _not_ leave with him, but hey, at least Joe had a plan. Ryan wasn’t sure if that was meant to be comforting or not, especially since the damn whispering could really only mean they were being watched. He was probably being watched right that moment. 

The apartment was _exactly_ the same as the one he’d just left but that didn’t stop Ryan doing exactly what Joe had suggested; he rifled through his drawers. The desk was full of pricey stationery, the sort Joe had had in his desk all those years ago at Winslow and frankly it wouldn’t’ve surprised Ryan one bit to find that the desk was actually his desk from his study back at the house he’d shared with Claire if it hadn’t come from his office. Maybe he’d ask, who knew. The books on the shelves really were the ones he’d had back then, aging pages full of notes in the margins in Joe’s familiar handwriting. The bathroom was full of the kind of overpriced toiletries that usually made Ryan roll his eyes though he knew some of the stuff he’d used back when Gwen had actually thought he was alive was pretty much on a level. And the kitchen was pretty fully stocked, vegetables and fruits on the counter, the refrigerator full and neatly organised, counters clean, chopping boards well used. He went through the drawers in there, too, pulled out a steak knife, tapped the blade against his hand and then left it on the countertop. It might come in handy later, he thought. 

The bedroom was surprisingly tidy for Joe and Ryan guessed if the place was owned and operated by some of the richest people in the world then it made sense they’d have the cash to hire a maid service. He went through drawers full of clothes, a closet full of suits and coats and shirts and ties and belts and more fucking books and Ryan’s was there, that goddamn thing he sometimes wished he’d never written but knew he couldn’t’ve not, all things considered. He picked it out of the stack and turned it over in his hands, read the crappy blurb on the back cover, flicked through the pages and found a piece of folded newsprint in there that drifted down to the floor and so he crouched, picked it up, flipped it open. He’d never bothered to read his obituary. Apparently Joe had. 

He took a shower, used Joe’s shower gel and Joe’s shampoo, decided _fuck it_ and used Joe’s toothbrush to brush his teeth, used Joe’s razor to shave and found he felt kinda better for doing it. He dried his hair off on a towel and put Joe’s clothes back on then he fixed a sandwich in the kitchen, ate hovering at the counter getting crumbs all over the damn place, realising just how damn hungry he’d been. He’d gulped down two whole bottles of water before he realised how damn thirsty he’d been, too, and then stretched out on the couch and dozed again. Fucking drugs. He wanted whatever the hell it was out of his system ASAP.

When the door opened, Ryan woke with a start; it was just Joe, balancing there on one leg to unlace his boots and leave them on the rack by the door to dry off. Joe eyed the steak knife Ryan had in his hand and shook his head as he set down his boots and put down his keys on the table by the door. 

“Would you please put that away before you put someone’s eye out with it?” he said, and came closer, took a seat beside Ryan on the couch with a squeak of the worn leather. And then his gaze went to the carefully clipped newsprint spread flat and unfolded there on the coffee table. “Ah.”

“Yeah,” Ryan said, as he set the knife down on the table beside it. “ _Ah_.”

Joe rested his head back; Ryan watched him close his eyes and take a long, deep breath. 

“You thought I was dead.”

Joe smiled, but his head was still tilted back against the back of the leather couch and his eyes were still closed. “Until this morning, yes.” 

“So, what’s the plan?”

Joe frowned for a second then he turned his head against the couch, opened his eyes. Then he moved, turned himself sideways, brought one calf up onto the couch so he could lean in closer and Ryan let him, pretty damn confused by the way Joe’s hand went up to the side of his face, how he leant closer again till his nose brushed Ryan’s now substantially less prickly cheek. Maybe he should’ve flinched away but he didn’t.

“Just be aware they have eyes and ears everywhere,” Joe murmured, confirming Ryan’s suspicions as he was trailing his fingertips over the side of Ryan’s neck. It made Ryan shiver and Joe chuckled infuriatingly but Ryan stayed still for a second before he shifted, too. 

It was fucking insane but what the fuck, the world was insane, the world was full of rich, entitled serial killers so completely protected and insulated from the law that he’d _completely_ fucking failed to even locate a single one of inside a full calendar year and hell if he was going to work for them. He had no clue of the layout of the place from that one brief walk from one staff apartment building to another. He had no contacts, no equipment, no weapons aside from a pretty fucking dull steak knife borrowed from Joe’s kitchen. It was fucking insane but he did it anyway because this wasn’t how he was going to end. He followed Joe’s lead and tangled his fingers in Joe’s short hair, brushed his mouth against Joe’s jaw, too close for comfort, _overwhelmingly_ too close for comfort. But he could pretend if he needed to, for cover, for his freedom.

“Tell me everything,” Ryan murmured, his mouth by Joe’s ear. 

So Joe told him everything. And Ryan went to sleep that night still feeling Joe’s mouth hot against his throat. 

\---

One of the sourpuss guards brought Ryan a toothbrush the next morning and as the door closed again and Ryan turned to Joe who was eating an omelet at the small dining table in the living room, Joe shook his head mock-sadly. 

“You used my toothbrush, didn’t you,” he said. 

Ryan shrugged. “Yeah, consider yourself lucky that’s all you’ve got to worry about,” he replied. Joe took the new toothbrush, but Ryan was pretty sure that was just to spite him and not because he really cared about it.

He wore Joe’s clothes for the next three days before the guards came in and brought him a suitcase full of brand new crap that was actually in his size. He’d’ve liked to’ve burned it instead of wearing it but it was pretty cold outside for streaking. Not that he was allowed outside. Not that he could go anywhere at all.

Ryan cooked on the fourth night instead of making Joe do it, maybe just for variety ‘cause Joe’s cooking was limited pretty tightly to the kind of crap that took three hours and eight pans and a fucking bain marie. He made a chicken stir fry in Joe’s fancy wok and made Joe do the dishes after; he stepped up behind him at the sink, slid his hands over Joe’s hips, leaned up against his back to ask if they were making any progress. Joe turned his head, reached one soapy hand back into Ryan’s messy hair and told him yes, they were making progress. He was working on his contact but it would take some time. Ryan didn’t doubt him. He stayed there a second longer than he needed to because that was Joe, fucking charming to the last, even now, even knowing what he knew about the guy, even after all that time. It’d just taken him a few years and a hostage situation to admit Joe was the most important person in his life as well as his fucking nemesis. Then he stepped away. 

After a week, the guards took Ryan to the principal. 

Joe went with him but was left outside like some kind of a naughty schoolboy except he sat there in the outer office flirting with the guy’s secretary just like a pro. Ryan guessed he pretty much was, considering how Joe had conned so many people into doing so many fucking atrocious things for him over the years, and then he went into the office when he was called. The two guards went with him, their ridiculous damn MAC-10s pointed roughly at his back. He didn’t point out that if they fired they’d take out the principal, too, though he was pretty damn tempted just to see the looks on their faces. They weren’t exactly SEALs, they just dressed like it. 

“Joseph tells me you’re ready to join us after all,” said the principal. He was a commanding guy, Ryan guessed from the first fifteen seconds after his grand entrance, how the guards deferred to him, how he stood when Ryan came in, the grip of his handshake, his poise as he sat. He wasn’t tall but wasn’t short, wasn’t thin but wasn’t fat, hair greying but not receding, a totally average East coast white guy in a suit except he had some kind of gravitas projecting from in there somewhere. Ryan was pretty sure the guy had graduated the same damn school sometime in the past. Joe said it’d been around since the 1800s, hush-hush, underground. 

“Joe’s pretty persuasive,” Ryan replied. “And I guess I don’t have much of a choice.”

“We could dispose of you instead,” said the principal, with a hint of a smile. 

Ryan chuckled. “Yeah,” he said. “Like I said: I don’t have much of a choice.” 

He seemed to make an impression, though what he wanted to do was slam the guy’s head down against the desk. They hired him; he didn’t want to think too hard about what the alternative would’ve been. 

“What did he say?” Joe asked, that night, when he cornered Ryan by the kitchen door. He stepped in close, walked Ryan back against the doorframe and by then it didn’t seem even half as fucking weird as it had in the start to slip one hand to the back of Joe’s neck, fingertips toying with the ends of his dark hair. What _was_ weird was Joe’s mouth at the side of his neck, the way his teeth grazed his skin and made him shiver with it. 

“I’m in,” Ryan said. “Work shadowing for a week. Then they’ll let me be some kind of a substitute gym teacher for the rest of the semester. How did we get here?” 

Joe snickered against his neck. Joe’s hands went down to Ryan’s hips. 

“I should tell you something,” Joe said, rather than answering the question, but Ryan guessed it’d been rhetorical anyway. “We’re going to need more time than we can sensibly take in a doorway, I’m sorry to say.” 

Ryan knew what that meant, so he let Joe take him by the wrist and lead him into the bedroom like he’d been led a whole bunch of times before, just not by Joe. He let Joe help him out of his sweater, out of the t-shirt he’d been wearing underneath, let him press his mouth to the spot at his chest where the pacemaker stood out under the skin and that was fucking weird, the weirdest thing for years because it was Joe’s fault he even had it in the first place, Joe’s damn knife in his heart. His hands were unsteady as he unbuttoned Joe’s shirt, untucked it from his pants with more difficulty than he’d expected and dropped it onto the floor with a frustrated huff. Joe was infuriatingly fucking amused by that but Ryan let him drag him down onto the bed anyway, playing the part, wondering how the fuck he’d wound up in this dumbass situation in the first place, how he’d wound up trusting _Joe Carroll_ of all people, how talking in whispers covered with a pseudo-relationship they’d never had was the only way to get it done. It was like the biggest cliché of an undercover op and he could barely believe anyone was buying it.

“You ever ask yourself why they’re so damn willing to believe we’re...y’know?” Ryan asked, once Joe was stretched out on top of him, shirtless, propped there on his forearms as he pressed his mouth hotly to Ryan’s jaw. 

“Lovers?” Joe supplied. “No, not really. Everyone always seemed to think we were having it off. I thought it was hilarious at the time.” Ryan, for his part, wasn’t totally sure how to respond to that. 

Then he told Ryan all about his contact, about the 17-year-old daughter of a US senator, the one who’d petitioned the school to have Joe Carroll brought there to the Harrington School to teach high school English. She was infatuated, he said, and a bit of a genius with computers, which was exactly what they needed. He was giving her extra tuition, after hours, strictly professional but his usual charm hadn’t gone unnoticed and though Ryan snorted at that, he guessed he understood because it wasn’t like he hadn’t gotten wind of Joe’s reputation back at Winslow. Joe’s hips ground against his and he bit back a groan and Joe bit down lightly at his collarbone and Ryan raked his nails down Joe’s back in retaliation and fuck, _fuck_ , he pushed him away and pulled back and he stalked straight out of the room. He didn’t even like Joe. They weren’t friends, they weren’t buddies, they weren’t soulmates or whatever the hell Joe had called them back before the execution and he sure as hell wasn’t going to get off in Joe’s bed, grinding against him like some goddamn horny teen just to keep up some crazy-ass cover story. No. Just no. 

Except there he was in the bathroom ten minutes later, leaning against the sink with his hand shoved down the front of his jeans. He shut his eyes as he came so he wouldn’t have to see himself in the mirror.

\---

He work-shadowed a guy called Simeon in a pair of short-shorts for the next week. It wasn’t the weather for short-shorts but apparently Simeon didn’t let that stop him and from what he overheard by lurking unobtrusively by the locker room door, Ryan had gotten to the same general opinion of the guy after the first couple of classes that the students had. 

The Harrington School was, as it turned out, an exclusive private co-ed boarding school. They had somewhere in the region of 200 students, kids of politicians and businessmen, investment bankers, goddamn international royalty, all of them killers or killers’ kids. And they taught them everything they’d need to know to get them through high school and keep themselves under the radar, got them through their SATs before they’d all filter out into Ivy League colleges. It made Ryan sick to his stomach. Joe, on the other hand, was pretty pragmatic about the whole thing; Ryan guessed with the experiences in education Joe had had, that wasn’t exactly surprising. 

Ryan took over Simeon’s classes the following week and moved out of Joe’s apartment after classes on Monday, right on schedule. Joe helped him shift his pretty meagre amount of crap out and across the quad to the place he’d woken up in that first day, stopped in the doorway and after a moment, a really damn weird moment where all they did was stand there, looking at each other like they’d never even met before or like they’d never been anywhere but there, Joe stepped in and kissed him. One hand went into Ryan’s hair and the other to Ryan’s waist and Joe pressed his mouth to his, his nose awkwardly against Ryan’s cheek, nails against his scalp and okay, if nothing else it scared the guards away, sent them scurrying away down the corridor with their fucking MAC-10s but Ryan’s hands went to the back of Joe’s shirt and he pulled him inside, kicked the door shut behind them. Joe had probably just wanted the guards gone; this was something else.

“What are you doing?” Joe asked. 

Bewilderment on Joe’s face was fucking hilarious and Ryan laughed because he didn’t have a fucking clue, he just pushed Joe up against the back of the apartment door and he went down on his knees, dimly aware that Joe was looking at him like he’d totally lost his mind. That pretty much didn’t stop throughout, even when Ryan’s fingers fumbled at the buckle of Joe’s belt, when he yanked his slacks down over his thighs, when he stroked him till he was hard just kneeling there on the fucking wooden floor looking up at him, looking Joe Carroll right in the face. He was _still_ looking at him, Joe was still watching him, when he took the tip of his cock into his mouth, Joe’s fingers going tight in his hair. It was literally seconds like that, the tip of Ryan’s tongue trailing over the underside of Joe’s ridiculous erection, before Joe came with a shout he tried to muffle with one sweater-clad arm and Ryan swallowed hard, let him out of his mouth in the end once he was done, dropped his head into his hands as he knelt there. 

“What the bloody hell was _that_?” Joe asked, tucking himself back into his pants in a pretty perfunctory manner. 

Ryan just picked himself up off the floor and shook his head, rubbing the back of his neck. 

“Get out,” he said, which he thought was a pretty straightforward response. “Get the fuck out. _Go_.”

So Joe did just that and slammed the door behind him so hard it made the brand new glassware rattle on the kitchen counter. And Ryan had no fucking idea why he’d done what he’d done. 

He went to class the next day and the day after that, watched spoiled kids run laps and hit baseballs and he watched crappy TV in the evening while he microwaved shitty Chinese food and by the third day he actually _missed_ Joe’s pretentious-ass sous-vide lamb chops and homemade mint sauce. He went to class on the fourth day and realised with a total lack of horror that was horror in itself that the kids were vicious goddamn monsters who were just as damn likely to beat each other to death with their lacrosse sticks as they were to play with them. But hell, he’d worked for the FBI. He’d done worse. He _was_ worse. 

And then, the next day, he went over to Joe’s office in the main school building, a great old goddamn manor house that looked like it’d been transported brick by brick from Britain on some sail-rigged tall ship because hell, he’d gone and shot himself in the foot, he’d fucked up, whatever the plan was that Joe had he’d written himself out of it in one fell swoop. So he jogged up the stairs in his school-issue tracksuit, _The Harrington School_ embroidered on the chest like anyone who wasn’t someone had ever heard of it, and he wandered down the damn corridors reading names on nameplates on doors until he found Joe’s, _Dr J Carroll_ up on the door like this was some damn alternate universe where Joe Carroll hadn’t officially died by lethal injection. 

He knocked. He waited. Joe called _come in_ and so he did. 

“Ryan,” Joe said, from his desk by the window, and Ryan guessed he’d been wrong because _that_ was the desk from his office at Winslow. The damn office was a lot like it all in all: old, wood-panelled walls all lined with books, Joe sitting in the midst of it like a brilliant goddamn scholar. Ryan guessed in a way he had been. Of course, now he was a glorified high school English teacher who had no official existence in the world outside the school’s walls. “I wasn’t expecting you.” 

“Why?”

Joe frowned. “Why _what_ , exactly?”

“Why weren’t you expecting me?”

Joe put down his pen and leaned back in his seat and Ryan crossed his arms over his chest as he watched him. They eyed each other. It wasn’t like they’d never done that before.

“You threw me out of your apartment, Ryan. I remember it quite clearly.”

“I’m moving back into yours.” 

Joe tilted his head just a fraction, narrowed his eyes almost suspiciously. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

Ryan shrugged. “I’m saying you should plan on cooking for two,” he said. “And that your couch is _not_ as comfortable as you think it is.”

They went to bed together that night and Joe told him all of the new developments, such as they were, while Ryan stripped him naked first and then himself. He was still talking when Ryan stretched out on top of him, still talking when Ryan’s leaned there on one forearm and took Joe’s cock in his free hand along with his own. He was still talking when Ryan started stroking the two of them together, murmuring in Ryan’s ear but Ryan had long since stopped listening. Joe didn’t seem to care. Ryan wasn’t in a hurry to stop him. 

After, as Joe slept, Ryan wondered how the hell he’d wound up sharing a bed with Joe Carroll. He wondered how he was ever going to pretend this was all still just a plan. Mostly, he wondered if it ever had been. 

\---

Three weeks passed, then four. 

Ryan would stop by Joe’s office at lunch because it made sense since everyone knew Joe had gone to bat for getting him hired after the incident with the assistant principal, everyone knew they were sharing a place, sat there in his tracksuit with his running shoes propped up on the coffee table while Joe scowled at that and they ate from trays of weirdly good cafeteria food that they had brought up for them. Joe read aloud and Ryan always wound up listening, stretched out on the office couch though he’d already read the damn books himself, all of them, most at least twice. They usually sounded better in a British accent, though, even if they’d been written by Americans. 

Five weeks passed and then the principal called Ryan in, told him they wanted him to teach the senior class to shoot. Ryan laughed and walked out but then three days later he was down on the school’s own basement gun range, discussing gun safety and handing out ear protectors. There were guards at the door, Tweedledum and Tweedle-fucking-dee with their dumbass MAC-10s but Ryan had a loaded SIG in his hands and there was a moment, just a flash of a second of a moment, when he wondered if he could get past the class of over-entitled seniors to the guards at the door, get a bullet in each of them before their guns went up and went off. Maybe he could’ve but he’d never have made it off the estate. So he taught a bunch of kids to handle handguns instead. They were surprisingly receptive. Maybe that was something to do with the fact that the administration had made it clear that Ryan Hardy was a damn good shot with an impatient streak.

Six weeks. The kids went away around Easter, or most of them did, joined their families wherever the hell they were and the faculty were left alone on campus. Ryan had kept pretty much to himself, been introduced to the others but couldn’t’ve given less of a crap about who they were or where they’d come from if he’d tried, even if they’d made an effort to tell him. Maybe it was something to do with the fact that their English teacher was a guy who’d supposedly been put to death in Virginia but had wound up grading papers on Shakespeare in upstate New York. Maybe it was the fact they were teaching the kids to shoot just as often as they were teaching them to drive, or how those kids knew just as much about basic computer hacking and body disposal as they did about American History. The place was fucked up so the faculty had to be. So was the fact that he spent the whole damn vacation period playing chess with Joe by the boating lake. He didn’t even like chess.

Nine weeks. The recoil from the shotgun he’d been firing on the old tennis courts for class had fucked up Ryan’s shoulder till it throbbed under his t-shirt and Joe’s incessant rambling about how his students were so damn intelligent was grating on his nerves and when he got out of the shower, the heat having done nothing for the throbbing in his shoulder, the noise having done nothing to deter Joe’s incessant fucking babbling, he snapped. He shoved Joe up against the nearest wall and he pressed his hand over his throat and he pushed to shut him the fuck up. Joe shut the fuck up. Then Joe kissed him, just like he’d done that day in the other apartment, hard and deep and with his fingers tight in his hair. Maybe Ryan wasn’t the only one who’d snapped.

They didn’t talk as they went through into the bedroom. Neither of them said a word as they stripped off each other’s clothes, as they went down on the bed. Neither of them said a word as they lay there on their sides, chest to chest, as Joe pressed at Ryan’s shoulder and made him hiss with the pain of it but then Joe kissed him again and fuck, it was like this was everything they should’ve ever had, like they should’ve skipped the stabbing and the cults and the faked lethal injections and gone straight for this - hell, maybe Claire would’ve liked it, or maybe Claire would’ve left, but then maybe it couldn’t’ve worked until later, until they’d both known what the other was. Maybe he should’ve stayed with him at Korban instead or gotten him away from the FBI after that, should’ve broken him out of the goddamn prison or something, anything, maybe should’ve just kissed him that day he let himself be taken hostage, should’ve fucked him up against the wall, should’ve killed him himself and gotten it finished once and for all. 

Joe pushed him down on his chest on the mattress and Ryan let him ‘cause Christ, there was no way to deny it now, not really, not at all. Joe reached for the drawer in the nightstand and Ryan laughed into the pillow and let him do that, too, let Joe drag his prickly cheek down the line of his spine to the dimples down at his lower back, let him spread his cheeks, let him rub the pad of one thumb between them. Joe licked him there, the whole thing fucking obscene, experimentally at first but then more boldly, hotly, wetly, thumb rubbing there alongside his tongue, pushing into him and Ryan’s cock jerked with it, hard, caught between his belly and the mattress so he rubbed against it. 

They didn’t talk when Joe pulled back, when he slicked his fingers with a kind of wet sound that made Ryan flush from his cheeks right down his neck. Joe’s fingers pushed into him, just for a second before he coaxed Ryan up on his hands and knees and then they were back in him, the position easier, till Joe pulled back and he slicked himself with the same stuff and the same sound and fuck, then the head of his cock was up against Ryan’s asshole and he’d never, _never_ imagined this. He’d wanted Claire, he’d wanted Gwen, he’d _never_ wanted Joe. 

“Do it,” he said, because it turned out he wanted Joe after all. So Joe pushed inside him. 

It was over pretty quickly after that; Joe wrapped one hand around Ryan’s cock and jerked him off while Ryan pushed back against him because he couldn’t not. It wasn’t like he’d ever done it with a guy before because he had, drunken nights when he hadn’t cared who he’d gone home with, a couple of guys at the academy, a couple from the Bureau over the years, but he’d always been drunk off his ass. He hadn’t been drunk in weeks, hadn’t had a single goddamn drink, not since he’d been back in DC, not while there at Harrington though by God he’d wanted to. Joe pulled him up off of his hands till he was there upright on his knees with his back pressed up against Joe’s chest, too hot, one of his hands going down to guide Joe’s and that was it, that was all it took for him to get off with Joe still inside him. Joe wasn’t far behind, pressing his mouth to the back of Ryan’s shoulder to muffle his groan. 

They showered together after, muscles strained, almost awkward as they practically held each other upright under the spray, washed each other down. They were face to face as Joe’s fingers dipped down between Ryan’s cheeks again and then Joe was on his knees and fuck, _fuck_ , Joe’s smug little smile as Ryan’s cock twitched back to life shouldn’t’ve been so much of a turn-on. It was. 

Then they went to bed and they turned out the light. Ryan had never been great with relationships. He wondered if that was what this was.

\---

Ten weeks. Eleven. Thirteen and then it was graduation then the summer vacation and then the kids all left and the two of them didn’t go anywhere. They _couldn’t_ go anywhere, even though they had passports sitting there in Joe’s desk there in the apartment, blue-covered US passports that called them _Joseph Carlton_ and _Ryan Harmon_ , like that was a sensible choice of name for two guys who’d been in the news as much as they had. But the passports were for show. They both knew they couldn’t leave. 

Ryan was holding his passport when he realised, after he’d been there sixteen weeks, seventeen, mid-August and they spent days in or by the school’s outdoor pool that they’d pretty much claimed as their own or in their air-conditioned apartment, avoiding everyone else on campus except maybe the maids, maybe the guy who brought their groceries and took away their new list. Ryan was standing there at Joe’s desk by the window with his passport in his hand, flipped to the photo, reading all the fake details he was fucking _positive_ would stand up to scrutiny even if they shouldn’t have. But they hadn’t even tried to get out and Joe’s contact was now on her way to Harvard. She’d probably make a great lawyer. It wasn’t like any of the kids there would have a problem with success.

They’d spent weeks making plans in the start, talking about how they’d get past the perimeter, how they’d get out of town and cross state lines, how they’d get overseas, where they’d go. They’d spent weeks talking about how they’d get new passports ‘cause maybe Ryan still had a few viable contacts out there somewhere, how they’d take all the information with them that they could scrape together with Joe’s contact’s help and they’d leverage it, tell Eliza’s friends and masters that if they touched Gwen or Max or Mike or Claire or Joey or any of the others, then they’d put that information out on the web and they’d bring them down but until then, it’d be live and let live. It didn’t sit well with Ryan’s sense of justice but really, fuck his sense of justice. If he’d ever given a fuck about justice in the first place he’d’ve turned himself in and gotten himself his own cell on death row right by Joe’s with a matching prison jumpsuit. 

He put the passport away, tucked it into the drawer with Joe’s, and then he pulled down the blinds and he went to bed. 

They’d made plans for weeks in the start, in whispers as they lay together in bed, in moments before Ryan left Joe’s office and went back to class. And then they hadn’t. They’d gone on, Ryan heading into Joe’s office at lunch, bending him over the desk like he’d wanted to do back at Winslow if he was honest with himself and maybe he was these days, and sometimes it felt like he could pretend that Winslow was where they were and when they were, not on some goddamn locked-down school campus in New York state. Joe would be talking the whole time but somehow that was a turn-on, that fucking accent, the filthy things he said in that poetic way he said them that made Ryan want to wrap his hands around Joe’s neck and squeeze and sometimes he did. 

They’d gone on, watching shitty TV after dinner Joe made or discussing the new handguns they’d just gotten in for the new term and progress the contractors were making on the new outdoor firing range or Ryan would get sucked into a philosophical discussion about art and love and death and poetry until he was basically telling Joe - again - that his book was a derivative piece of crap that needed a ruthless editor with a trusty red pen at the ready. Then they’d head into the bedroom and Joe would bitch the whole time while Ryan sucked him off. Ryan found it amusing. 

Joe was there in bed already when Ryan got there, passport back in its place in the drawer, reading a book by lamplight that he put down when Ryan stripped down to his boxers and slipped in there next to him. He’d been using Ryan’s bogus obituary as a bookmark for five months. Ryan found that amusing, too.

“You never had a plan,” Ryan said, stretching out under the sheets, and it wasn’t a question. It’d been dawning on him for weeks.

Joe just looked at him for a moment, sitting there in his buttonless, pull-on PJs that pretty much always made Ryan roll his eyes. Apparently he’d picked up the pyjama habit at boarding school and never lost it. There was a hell of a lot more he’d learned about Joe in the five months they’d been there at the Harrington School than he’d had in the years before that and it wasn’t just the fact he hated brussels sprouts or that he’d never gotten circumcised. He knew all Joe’s quirks. Joe knew his. 

“There was always a plan, Ryan,” Joe said. “Even when there wasn’t a _plan_ , there was a plan.” 

Ryan chuckled. He’d done a hell of a lot more of that lately and he guessed that was fine. 

“ _This_ was the plan,” Ryan said.

Joe knew what he meant, of course, because Joe always knew what he meant. He meant the school and the apartment and the kitchen full of culinary equipment that looked like implements of torture and could probably be used that way in the right hands, in _Joe’s_ hands. He meant getting their clothes mixed up so Ryan would come in after class and change out of his tracksuit and into a sweater that wasn’t actually his, not that that mattered to either of them. He meant how Ryan had petitioned the school board to put in an assault course that he ran once a week and the fact that in the end, Joe was alive. He’d watched him die but there he was. He meant the fact that all of this was as close to a damn miracle as two jaded old atheists could get. 

The plan was never to escape. They’d have died trying or gotten everyone they might’ve cared about killed in the process and Joe had had that figured out before he’d even known Ryan was alive. Joe had never planned to escape. He’d planned to live the life he’d thought he’d lost, but Ryan knew he hadn’t changed. 

“This was always the plan,” Joe confirmed, and he reached over to turn out the light to cover the look Ryan knew was creeping onto his face. “But don’t you think I’d make an excellent headmaster?”

And yeah, he did. And who knew where that could take them.


End file.
